I’m building a site using the executive theme and want to use the homepage not as the “latest posts” but rather a static page. However, the responsive slider and other home widgets won’t work with this setting. Any way around this? I’ve tried adding a widgetized area to the functions.php and moving the slider there, but even still, it’s not working.

Current temporary URL where I’m working is — http://66.147.244.211/~applebar/blog/

I second that, I would like to use “featured images” for a page, that way I don’t have to have the image visible on the page. In a way each image acts as a cover page for the pages that I would like to be linked into the slider.